If Herman Cain did not do the things that are alleged of him, then he should soldier on. If he did do them, and is lying about it now, then he should retire from the field in a cloud of contumely. All the spectators, meantime, should meditate on what constitutes proof, and assume the accusation to be false because it has not been shown to be true. Making the accusation in person is not evidence. Showing up blonde is not an argument.
But it is not as though such things are impossible. If at some point these charges are shown to be true, then, like I said, a cloud of contumely.
But I have another point. The double standard that governs these affairs is often commented on, and complained about. The lowest form of political punditry is “what if Bush had done that?” If Cain had only been named Kennedy instead of Cain, he could have done all that alleged groping and more, and then left this Sharon Bialek to drown in an abandoned car — a sure path to becoming a lionized leftist hero.
Most who comment on this double standard do so in order to complain about it. But this reveals that they are living in a halcyon past, when the differences between the political parties were not quite so stark — when one of the parties was not so manifestly wicked. They want the political contest to be a debate between the internal improvement Whigs and the agrarian Republicans, with most of the consequences of going one way instead of the other to be found in a close reading of Livy or Cicero. They want politics to be a sport in which gentlemanly competition is still possible, along with an urbane agreement to disagree. When it doesn’t go that way, they complain. But we really ought not to complain about this.
We are not living in such a time. When it comes to European finances, we are three ticks away from a zombie apocalypse. When it comes to sexual politics, we can no longer tell the difference between boys and girls, a distinction that didn’t used to be so hard. We can’t even tell the difference between Israel and Hamas.
If politics were like a football game, then clipping for one team would be clipping for another. Unsportsmanlike conduct would be a penalty that would be applied even-handedly to both teams. Both teams would get three points for a field goal, instead of one team getting one point and the other getting six. That is to say, that is the way it would be in a well-reffed game, where the intention was to be fair, and where both sides understood that.
But this is not a game — it is rather a battle. In this battle, there is a difference between civic righteousness and unrighteousness. You can tell this at a glance by which side is allowed to play dirty and which side is not. This is not a difference in the color of uniforms. In this set-up, you can tell which team is which by glancing at what tactics are permissible. Which team is required to discipline its hypocrites? And which team finds it increasingly difficult even to find room to be hypocritical?
It is true that some are up to this latter challenge — Anthony Weiner comes to mind — but in twenty years I will hazard a guess that Weiner will have found a comfortable niche in the museum of pioneer martyrs. He will be giving interviews in which he will tell an admiring public that he had the misfortune to have this “happen to him” before Americans were fully comfortable with cell-phone-sexuality. “But now that the U.N. Human Rights Commission has determined that this is yet another ground-breaking gender, making twelve in all thus far, this opened the door for me to release my book on this little-understood phenomenon, with many never-before-seen photos.”
And in related news, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana seceded from the Union.
In this battle, both teams are made up of sinners, so that is not the distinction. Andrew Klavan has made a similar point, on why it is good that Herman Cain gets unfair treatment. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, the presence of hypocrisy means that there is some semblance of virtue still around to pay tribute to. We should therefore take the double-standard right in stride, and glory in it.
In a melee this confusing, we sometimes need that double standard around. We can use it as our standard.